#Zombie Friday: Review & G*veaway-PORTLANDTOWN by Rob DeBorde

First, a quick commercial interruption. My vampire boys are over at the Ramblings from this Chick blog today, talking about the latest in vampire attire (well, sort of). There are only a few dates left on the tour for Susannah Sandlin's Absolution and the tour prize of a Kindle paperwhite or $100 gift card, so head over and enter!

Today, I’m looking at Portlandtown, by debut author Rob DeBorde. It has magic and zombies and cowboys and cursed books…cool stuff, in other words.

ABOUT THE BOOK: Welcome to Portlandtown, where no secret is safe---not even those buried beneath six feet of Oregon mud. Joseph Wylde isn’t afraid of the past, but he knows some truths are better left unspoken. When his father-in-law’s grave-digging awakens more than just ghosts, Joseph invites him into their home hoping that a booming metropolis and two curious grandtwins will be enough to keep the former marshal out of trouble. Unfortunately, the old man’s past soon follows, unleashing a terrible storm on a city already knee deep in floodwaters. As the dead mysteriously begin to rise, the Wyldes must find the truth before an unspeakable evil can spread across the West and beyond. Rob DeBorde's Portlandtown is a supernatural western, a fantastic blend of horror, magic, and zombies sure to excite even the most demanding genre fan.

MY THOUGHTS: This book’s press release called it a book in the vein of Stephen King’s Dark Tower, so you know I couldn’t resist giving it a read. Is it the second coming of Dark Tower? No, that’s just publisher hype. But it’s a really good read.  

The cons: Authors are always admonished to start in the middle of the action, and usually that’s good advice. But it gave this book a really slow start while I spent about five or six chapters wondering what the hell was going on. By the time the setups are all in place, however, I’d gotten hooked. It just took a while for me to get there.

The pros: Once the story kicks in and the zombie, a sort of cursed cowboy-on-steroids known as The Hanged Man, starts his reign of terror, it’s really, really engrossing. The story is set in Portland in the late 1800s, and is one of the best books I’ve read in a long time in terms of using its setting to maximum benefit. Portland in the late 1800s was wet and in a constant state of flooding, and the city becomes a character in itself. The actual characters—particularly blind bookstore owner Joseph and his wife and their twins—all of whom have a magic all their own—are likeable and fun. I give the book a solid thumb’s up!

You know the drill to be entered for the win: one entry for comment, a second for blog follow, third for Twitter follow @Suzanne_Johnson, a fourth for a tweet or retweet, a fifth for a Facebook friending. Have you read any zombie westerns? Zombie books in general?